Franklin Graham’s Uneasy Alliance with Donald Trump

The evangelical pastor Franklin Graham is well aware of the critique often levelled against him: that he’s more politically and spiritually partisan than his father, Billy.

Photograph by Rozette Rago / NYT / Redux

In early August, Spokane felt on the verge of apocalypse. A hundred-and-six-degree wind buffeted the valley. The air was choked with ash and smoke from two duelling forest fires. Yet, in the windowless hotel conference room where I was to meet the controversial pastor Franklin Graham, the frigid air made it possible to ignore impending calamity. Graham is the eldest son of Billy Graham, the most influential evangelical leader in twentieth-century America, who died this past February. He leads a seven-hundred-and-sixty-five-million-dollar evangelical empire, which includes the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and also his international Christian relief effort, Samaritan’s Purse. But, since 2016, Graham has become known, above all, as the most vociferous evangelical ally of Donald Trump. This summer, in response to Walmart’s sale of “IMPEACH 45” T-shirts, Graham manufactured his own merch: a hundred-per-cent-cotton “PRAY FOR 45” T-shirt, which sells at the Billy Graham bookstore for $15.99.

When I met with Graham in Spokane, he was on the West Coast leg of his “Decision America” tour, which has taken him to all fifty states since 2016. Graham casts the events as “prayer and evangelism,” in the tradition of his father’s crusades. But the tour is, in fact, much more akin to a political rally than a religious revival, and Graham benefits from blending the two in order to turn out like-minded crowds of hard-line conservatives. To the initiated, the word “decision” is a double-entendre: it means both to make a decision to follow Christ, or to be born again, and also to make a decision at the ballot box. Graham is careful to stress that he tells people only to “vote Biblically,” but this is a code his followers understand. “He didn’t say who to vote for,” Tom Phillips, a senior member of Graham’s staff, said in Spokane. “He didn’t have to.” (A spokesperson for Graham stressed that “Franklin never endorsed any candidate and said often during the tour that he didn’t have faith in the Republicans or Democrats, and that only God could save our country.”)

Billy Graham, a lifelong Democrat who supported both Democratic and Republican Presidents, promoted a message of religious and political unity. As far back as the nineteen-fifties, he attempted to desegregate his crusades, inviting Martin Luther King, Jr., to stand onstage alongside him. “Billy Graham’s style was openhanded invitation,” Robert P. Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, said. “He didn’t shy away from talking about sin, but it didn’t feel like an assault.” Franklin Graham, by contrast, possesses little of his father’s charisma. Personally and politically, he is far more divisive. After September 11th, he famously called Islam “a very evil and very wicked religion,” a position that put him on a public trajectory toward the hard-right wing of the Republican Party. “This was the key political turning point that set the stage for his prominence with Fox News and with Donald Trump,” Thomas Kidd, a professor at Baylor University, told me. Since 2012, the Trump Foundation has donated at least a hundred thousand dollars to Graham’s organizations, contributing to hurricane-relief efforts and to his 2015 campaign in support of “Biblical candidates.” That year, Graham supported Trump’s bid for a total ban on Muslim immigration to the United States. Graham is planning a trip to Blackpool, England, which, like Trump’s recent trip to the U.K., has faced public opposition from critics who argue that his preaching constitutes hate speech.

I first met Graham in 2003, when I travelled with him to Sudan. Samaritan’s Purse had been working in the south of the country for decades, but Graham had never been to the north, where he was going to meet the Sudanese dictator, Omar al-Bashir, who was waging war against his own people in Darfur and in southern Sudan. When the two men sat down in Bashir’s marble palace, Graham mentioned the hospital he ran in the south. Bashir turned to his aide and asked, in English, “Isn’t that the hospital we bombed?” To which Graham replied, “Twice, and you missed.” Graham then handed Bashir a George W. Bush reëlection campaign button that he’d taken from the desk of Karl Rove’s secretary.

After I returned from the trip, which I wrote about in my book “The Tenth Parallel,” Graham sent me a red-letter Bible, in which Jesus’s words are printed in red ink. That same year, he invited me to visit him in Boone, North Carolina, where we had dinner with his daughter, Cissie, and his wife, Jane Austin Cunningham, who scolded Graham for sneaking food to the dog under the table. Afterward, he gently warned me about the dangers of practicing yoga: its chants were demonic. Graham allowed me to poke around his home and office, which included a garage full of Harley-Davidsons and a gun safe. The walls of his office were decorated with a nail from ancient Rome—like the one used to nail Jesus to the cross, a caption said—and letters from Presidents. One, from George W. Bush, read, “We are doing all the right things in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

I next saw Graham on TV at Trump’s Inauguration. “Mr. President,” Graham said, turning to Trump, “in the Bible, rain is a sign of God’s blessing. And it started to rain, Mr. President, when you came to the platform. And it’s my prayer that God will bless you, your family, your Administration, and may He bless America.” He continued with a prayer from I Timothy: “For kings and for all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.”

In Spokane, Graham’s frailty startled me. At sixty-six, he looked much older and more worn than he had even two years ago. He took a seat in a ballroom chair, his large frame bent slightly forward in order to hear. I wondered if his tour was wearing him down. He’d returned to the Pacific Northwest “to penetrate the blue wall, ” as he’d said at one event. “Let’s go penetrate that blue wall, not for politics but for Jesus!”

Salvation, Graham stressed repeatedly, was his core message. “I speak about this issue of politics for five minutes, maybe four,” he assured me. Graham is well aware of the critique often levelled against him: that he’s more politically and spiritually partisan than his father. Billy Graham met every President from Truman to Trump, but he was particularly close to Richard Nixon, an intimacy he came to regret when the Watergate tapes became public and Nixon was heard repeating anti-Semitic remarks that Billy had made to him. In 2011, Billy Graham admitted that this closeness was an error. “Looking back I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn’t do that now,” he told the magazine Christianity Today.

When I asked Graham if there was a lesson in his father’s regrets, he brushed off the question, and told me the story of his dad’s reaction to Nixon instead. “He was hurt by President Nixon, and things that Nixon said, when, like the Watergate tapes, he never heard President Nixon cuss, use profanity—so that was a shock to him, and he felt a little bit betrayed by that.”

Billy Graham still went to the White House, Franklin reminded me, spending time with Clinton and George W. Bush. “But my father did not go out and campaign for people,” he said. “I don’t do that.” There were other ways to tip the political scale. His father invited George W. Bush to meet with him on the Sunday before the 2000 election. “Now, that was probably worth a few votes in Florida,” Graham told me.

The younger Graham said he did his best to avoid Beltway politics. “I stay out of Washington as much as I can,” he added. “I try to keep my distance.” That’s not easy under Trump, who, as we have seen, demands a display of total loyalty from his allies. Two weeks later, Graham flew to Washington, D.C., to attend a White House dinner for about a hundred evangelical leaders. Trump greeted Graham by name in his introductory remarks, and then he touted the work that he’d done on behalf of conservative Christians: he’d been the first President to address the March for Life from the Rose Garden; he’d spoken out against the persecution of Christians; he’d brought home hostages from North Korea and was fighting for the release of a pastor from Turkey; he’d reinstated the Mexico City Policy, which blocks federal funding for foreign nongovernmental organizations that provide abortions.

Later, with Graham seated next to him, Trump warned of the stakes for Christians if Republicans lost in the midterms. “They will overturn everything that we’ve done, and they will do it quickly and violently,” he said. Later, by phone, I asked Graham what he thought of this rhetoric about “violence” from the left—didn’t it seem far-fetched to him? Graham defended Trump, invoking the Cold War era, when Christians faced persecution in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. “I do agree, to some degree,” he said. “The Democratic Party is moving very quickly toward socialism, and I know what socialism does to the church.”

Graham doesn’t need to go to Washington to enter the political fray: he has 1.75 million followers on Twitter and another seven million on Facebook, where he often defends the President or Christian conservatives like Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who is back in the news for refusing to bake a cake that honors a woman’s gender transition. “Thank you Jack for your courage and perseverance in standing up for your beliefs,” Graham wrote in a recent post. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, he posted an open letter on Facebook that began, “Listen up—Blacks, Whites, Latinos and everybody else. Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience.” The screed earned him ire from fellow religious leaders and from people of color, who are an increasingly powerful demographic in the Church. I asked Graham if growing diversity among believers called for a new approach. “I don’t worry about that,” he replied. “I believe in preaching the word of God, ’cause his standards don’t change.”

Graham has also been criticized for his relationship with Vladimir Putin, which began before Trump took office. Putin’s anti-gay legislation aligns with Graham’s views, and, in 2014, Graham wrote, “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.” In 2015, Graham spent forty-five minutes with Putin in Moscow, discussing the persecution of Christians and what evangelical Christianity actually entails, Graham told me. He asked for Putin’s help in securing the freedom of Saeed Abedini, a pastor imprisoned in Iran. Abedini was released in 2016. Since then, Graham has often defended Trump for his approach on Russia, tweeting before their July 16, 2018, meeting, “Let’s pray for @POTUS @realDonaldTrump in these key meetings.” When Trump came under fire afterward for denying Russian interference in the U.S. election, Graham defended him for “pursuing peace above politics.”

Graham stood by his comments, even after Trump walked back his own. He told me that he didn’t think Trump should have gotten “more aggressive” with Putin. “I don’t think that’s the way you get things done,” he told me. Graham has repeatedly denied the possibility that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election, and is only slightly more circumspect on the issue of Russian interference. When pressed on the issue, he said, “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. But I do know that the United States has interfered in many countries’ elections. We’ve interfered in Iran, with the Shah. We interfered in Vietnam and put our own people in. We did this in Korea. And President Obama did this in Israel.” Graham, who is also a strong supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, was speaking about President Obama’s alleged support for the more liberal Israeli opposition during the 2015 election. This is one of the many conspiratorial half-truths that Graham has levelled as criticism against Obama. He has also supported outright lies, including the spurious accusation that Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

It was harder for Graham to deny recent evidence of Russia’s attempt to penetrate conservative evangelical circles. Through the Department of Justice’s indictment of the Russian operative Maria Butina, it has come to light that she targeted the National Prayer Breakfast, which Billy Graham helped launch, in 1953. “The Russians may have used this, of course,” Graham said. “I can tell you right now, everybody in that room has the same agenda. They’re wanting to be able to rub elbows with somebody that they normally couldn’t rub elbows with.”

Seeking influence wasn’t a crime, he said. That was politics. “Listen, the gays, they do everything they can to get their politicians into office, and they have every right to do that. And I’m just saying, we, as Christians, we have every right to have the Christian voice in office.”

This, Graham has said, is why he stands by Trump, who has defended the cultural conservatism that Graham identifies as “Christian.” And Trump’s moral failings are old news, he told me. “Well, you take American Presidents in the past. Bill Clinton wasn’t the first man to have an affair in the White House,” Graham said. “We’re all flawed, and the Bible says we’re all sinners. And the Bible tells us that God sent his son to take our sins, to die for our sins. And America needs a heart transplant. And we need to put our heart and faith and trust in Jesus Christ, because every politician—I don’t care who they are, what party you put in there—they’re flawed men or flawed women.”

“Do you think that President Trump really wants to turn the nation to God?” I asked.

“No,” Graham told me. “No. That’s not what he’s trying to do, no.”

The extreme heat in Spokane was enough to cancel public events, but Graham’s crusade went on as scheduled. The Spokane County Fair and Expo Center is a fifteen-minute drive from downtown, and only a few blocks away from Smokane and Lovely Buds, two legalized-marijuana dispensers. Graham’s event was sharing the fairground’s sandy lot with a large R.V. show. The revival kicked off at 5 P.M., with a reception for V.I.P.s and Billy Graham’s supporters.

As cars turned into the entrance, an anti-abortion protester jabbed a placard toward the sky—on it, the disturbing image of an unborn child’s seemingly severed head. Inside an air-conditioned outbuilding, Graham’s employees had set up folding tables with offerings of cheese cubes and chicken satays. Three of Graham’s young grandchildren, two polite sandy-haired girls in smocked sundresses and a boy in a blue blazer, stood by large coolers of water and iced tea, filling glasses. In a crowd of several hundred, there were only a handful of others under the age of sixty. Many were pushing walkers, and several I spoke to had been involved in Billy Graham’s Spokane crusades.

Standing on the dais, Graham invoked his late father, reassuring Billy’s followers that they were in for more of the same. He recalled that his father once told him, “Don’t you monkey with my crusades!” The crowd laughed and applauded. “We’re not changing nothing,” Graham said. The world was changing, however, and Graham described the role that the Internet played in evangelizing—bringing a new Christian into the faith “every twenty-one seconds,” he claimed. Graham said that he purchased words and phrases from Google, such as “does God love me,” to drive seekers to his site. Online, he could evangelize in countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran, where it was illegal.

“If I went into some of those countries, they’d cut my head off,” he said. Even for his upcoming trip to England, he said, “We’ve got a lot of opposition from Muslims and gays.” Graham asked for prayers for the trip and a wide range of other programs, including Operation Heal Our Patriots, which takes wounded veterans and their husbands and wives to Alaska for counselling. Often, veterans ended up getting baptized in a freezing lake. In Iraq, Samaritan’s Purse ran a hospital near Mosul, seven miles from the ISIS front line. “We had Muslims who gave their lives to Christ,” he said. “We don’t talk a lot about it because we want to be able to go back.” (Graham has publicly said, “Islam has declared war on the world.”)

After the reception, Graham ducked into a forest-green “Decision America” tour bus, for a respite from the heat. The bus had marble floors, and two bags of Tate’s Bake Shop cookies sat by the sink, next to a jar of salted peanuts. Graham seemed tired, fed up with political questions. They had nothing to do with the salvation he’d come to preach, he said, pouring himself an iced tea. “People think I’m closer to Donald Trump than I actually am, ” Graham said. “I haven’t seen Trump since my father’s funeral.” He didn’t want to go to the White House dinner, he told me, preferring to spend time with his family. “But people told me if I didn’t go it would look like a snub.”

The main event took place in the evening, outside on a steamy knoll. By 6 P.M., the grass was filling with nearly fifteen thousand people toting coolers and portable stadium chairs. By the time the lights on the stage came up, just after 7 P.M., the heat had eased by a few degrees. A drone buzzed in the smoky air, collecting video footage. I spotted two dozen leather-skinned men with graying ponytails and motorcycle jackets adorned with patches that read “Soul Patrol” and “Bikers for Christ.” One man with thinning long blond hair had the letters “IXOYE” on his jacket. “It’s the word early Christians used as a code for where they were meeting,” he told me. His name was Alexander Evan, but he went by Ace, he said, handing me a business card that read “Sons Redeemed Ministry.” He ministered by evangelizing to “misfits” like himself—many belonged to the one per cent, he told me, a term which confused me until he explained that it referred to outlaw motorcycle clubs.

I asked him why he’d come and he pointed to his friend Skip Sanford, who goes by Joker, a member of Bikers for Christ. Graham had called their head pastor, Joker said, and asked them to come out as a show of support. The men didn’t know Franklin well; they were more familiar with Billy, and neither was politically minded. “Trump’s an average guy coming into a position he doesn’t deserve,” Ace said.

“Know who Trump reminds me of?” Joker asked. “Saul.” In the Bible, Saul persecutes Christians before he has a conversion experience on the road to Damascus and becomes the apostle Paul. “He’s not Paul, though,” Joker said with a laugh.

Graham took the stage, leading his followers in a prayer from I Timothy 2: “For kings and for all those in authority”—the same intercession he’d offered at Trump’s Inauguration. This wasn’t only a call to high political office. “Can you imagine if the majority of the school board were controlled by God-fearing Christians?” he asked, continuing with a treatise on how secularism was no different from Communism, how abortion was murder, and how same-sex marriage was a sin against God. He was trying to rile the crowd, but many people looked sleepy and distracted. Maybe it was the heat.

As he drew his half-hour sermon toward its intended crescendo, Graham offered an invitation to those who were in need of salvation to stand. Some did, perhaps fewer than a hundred, while workers holding stacks of Bibles looked on. He asked them to pray, “Dear God, I am a sinner.” Then Jeremy Camp, a well-known Christian singer, played, while people folded up chairs and dumped ice out of coolers, hoping to beat the flock of cars out of the fairground lot.

Following the crowd to my rental car, I spied a blond and darkly tanned family still sitting on a picnic blanket, eating chicken and grapes. Kristina and Dave Bolich had come from their ranch, a thirty-minute drive from Spokane, so that their four daughters, aged sixteen to twenty-one, could listen to Graham. Kristina homeschooled them, in part to keep them out of a secular school system that taught things, like evolution, in which she didn’t believe. Now that they were older, headed into the world on their own, she wanted them to see that being a Christian was still possible and relevant. “They think no one’s like this anymore,” Kristina told me, glancing around at the crowd. No one was doing drugs, she said, no same-sex couples were kissing. The environment was a relief, she noted, but Graham had been a disappointment. “He’s a lot different than his dad,” she said. “If it were Billy, everyone would be enthralled.”